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“Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming,” observed Lionel Trilling. He added that blaming is interpreted in our culture as “the sign of virtue and intellect.” The Cambridge English Dictionary defines blame as “to say or think that someone or something did something wrong or is responsible for something bad that happened.”

Blame as a sign of virtue is always accompanied with a concurrent judgment of the “guilty” party’s unworthiness, untrustworthiness, or otherwise blame-worthy negative attributes. It’s an us versus them kind of thing in which “we” are okay and “they” are not, and it’s the driving force behind the kind of implicit bias that has enabled us collectively to avoid fully embracing the spirit of the Civil Rights legislation of the 60’s that was supposed to level the playing field so that persons of color could enjoy the rights and privileges the white classes have traditionally taken for granted.

Blaming as a sign of intellect implies a certain degree of insecurity on the part of the blamer, exemplified in its extreme form by our current president, whose profound insecurity requires of him damning judgments of anything and anyone he perceives as threatening to his fragile sense of self. This man’s particular display of the phenomenon also illustrates clearly that a towering intellect is not a necessary condition for a person  to engage in that sort of blaming.

Oftentimes, simple misunderstandings or other forms of miscommunication lead perfectly normal people to believe that someone did something wrong when in fact no such act occurred. These false accusations, often made in earnest, are usually accompanied by the assignment of responsibility for the imagined transgression , along with the implied message that some corrective measure is needed on the part of the accused in order to right the situation. The convoluted nature of these affairs can make it difficult to tease out the connecting threads to get at the heart of what was going on in the mind of the accuser at the time the imagined transgression took place.

How quickly we act to assign blame when something goes awry. It can range from the most insignificant of incidents, like “who spilled the milk,” to such consequential events as the recent Beirut ammonium nitrate explosion, which mr. trump immediately determined, erroneously, to be the work of unknown actors bent on further destabilizing the Levant. 

People seem to derive a sense of satisfaction in finding someone else responsible for events when they occur. There also seems to be an accompanying feeling that, in fixing blame, some sort of resolution is achieved, which is more than a bit ironic because the identification of responsible parties, while it may be a necessary step toward the resolution of whatever problem the event identified or spoke to, is only the beginning of the process of seeking solutions to assure the lessening of the likelihood the problem will continue to be an issue going forward.

But then, people generally favor simplicity in such matters. It eases the strain of having to think too hard or too deeply. And therein lies the problem with quick fixes; they’re often not fully thought out and don’t pay enough heed to the possible consequences,–a requisite  in order to make provision for contingencies in the event the fix should prove inadequate. But, as noted above, such thoroughness is  often perceived as too difficult or time-consuming or expensive an undertaking. Better, it seems, to do it half-assed, and pick up the pieces later!

Better yet to examine our human propensity to immediately assign blame at the first sign of trouble. How much grief and reason to waste energy could be avoided if we could learn to subjugate the urge to fix blame and instead skip straight to the identification of the factors contributing to the problem at hand. That done, the path would be cleared to allow us to craft workable and durable solutions to our problems without first having to wade through layers of drama in order to achieve them.

Tim Konrad

2020.08.14